Bees are Dying! Monsanto’s Roundup Blamed

Bees are Dying! Monsanto’s Roundup Blamed

If this trend continues 1/3 of our food crops will be in danger of disappearing, including foods many of us love, like apples, blueberries, broccoli and almonds.

Bees may not be cute and cuddly like pandas but they are so much more vital for our own foods. One third of world’s agricultural production depends on the European honeybee to pollinate the crops at certain vital parts of the year. This pollination results in SEEDS like FRUITS and MORE PLANTS. There are not enough wild bees or bats to accomplish this. Crops like wheat, potatoes and rice do not rely on insect pollination but many fruits and vegetables could become so scarce that their price would skyrocket… IF you could get them at all. It would be a completely different world.

When the task force of scientists starting researching into this problem they found that sometimes bees were being killed by certain factors including,

a). Synthetic poisoning from insecticides and other pesticides. This is now been well documented (see article below)

b). Infections from other organisms, like bacteria and viruses.

There seems to be an overriding factor decreasing overall health of the bees; thus making them more susceptible to poisons and infections. What the scientists suspected and are still proving is that the bee’s natural defenses are being undermined by POOR NUTRITION and other unnatural living conditions.

Nutrition for bees might sound rather odd since they eat only nectar and pollen. What has happened though, is that honeybees don’t have the VARIETY of flowers available to them because man has destroyed much of their habitat. We humans like our environment orderly so we clear the ditches of wild flowers and kill all the dandelion and clover in our lawns but to bees these areas are now nutritional wastelands. The bee industry is hopeful that restoring balance to the diet and habitat of bees can improve their well being and prevent total colony collapse. Here’s hoping.

Where have you heard the word VARIETY in our diet before? Probably from every dietitian and nutritionist who ever lived. This is a principle of health and regeneration – that no single wonder food can solve all your problems. Rather you need a balanced diet of whole live foods. We have such variety available to us in our gardens, farmer’s markets and supermarkets. Let’s all take advantage of that while we can!

When honeybees come into contact with glyphosate, the primary active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, they lose their ability to eat and have a much harder time learning how to forage properly. These are among the many shock findings of a recent study published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, which for the first time demonstrates both chronic and acute effects in honeybees exposed to Roundup at real-life levels.

A combined laboratory and field analysis conducted by researchers from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina found that Roundup exhibits harm at sub-lethal levels, meaning levels that don’t necessarily kill bees but that still affect them. Using the Apis mellifera type of honeybee, which is a primary pollinator in most agricultural environments, the team looked at how bees respond to trace levels of Roundup that match what they might find in a real-world foraging situation.

Based on these field-realistic doses, exposed bees were found to have reduced sucrose sensitivity, or a lowered ability to identify and track food. Exposed bees also experienced a drop in learning performance, as well as increased difficulties smelling food and other substances. And in terms of memory retention, exposed bees fared much worse than non-exposed bees, hence the tendency of bees in a colony collapse disorder (CCD) situation not being able to find their way back to the hive.

“We found a reduced sensitivity to sucrose and learning performance for the groups chronically exposed to GLY [glyphosate] concentrations within the range of recommended doses,” wrote the authors.

“Altogether, these results imply that GLY at concentrations found in agro-ecosystems due to standard spraying can reduce sensitivity to nectar reward and impair associative learning in honeybees.”

Honeybees bring Roundup back to the hive, poisoning all the other bees.

Indirect exposure to Roundup was also observed during the analysis, as bees were found to bring tainted nectar back to the hive, poisoning all the other bees in the process. While foraging behavior was not observed to be directly affected by bees’ exposure to Roundup, the distribution of Roundup via nectar did have a cumulative effect on the entire hive’s ability to function, which includes foraging.

“[W]e speculate that successful forager bees could become a source of constant inflow of nectar with GLY traces that could then be distributed among nest mates, stored in the hive and have long-term negative consequences on colony performance,” concluded researchers.

A 55-year beekeeping veteran, writing for Mother Earth News, speculated back in 2010 that Roundup is a primary cause of CCD. In his report, Terrence N. Ingram explained how, for years, he observed entire bee colonies collapsing almost immediately after nearby fields were sprayed with Roundup. By the end of the spraying season, entire colonies were completely dead, he repeatedly observed.

What this means for conventional agriculture is that banning neonicotinoid pesticides isn’t enough to stem the tide of bee die-offs that increasingly threatens the viability of the global food supply. Roundup, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, will also need to be scrapped if there is any chance at all of preserving our ability to grow food — and more than likely, there are many other untested pesticides in use that are harming honeybees as well.

“This is the first study on the sub-lethal effects of an herbicide on honeybee behaviour and we hope it contributes to understanding how honeybee hives situated in agricultural environments are affected by agrochemicals,” wrote the authors.

4 Comments

Verdi
April 1, 2009 at 2:40 pm

Found this website thought it may be of interest to those reading this article as well. My husband is entering semi retirement this year and we have signed up and are planning to volunteer. It’s called The Great Sunflower Project.

Be a bee-friendly gardener…..Canadian Geographic Magazine, December 2008

Providing food an shelter for flower-feeding insects can offer multiple satisfactions to gardeners:

 Make plantins more natural and complex so that your yard develops an ecological balance.
 Plan your flower beds to provide a steady succession of blooms, since pollinators need food throughout the growing season. This offers sustenance of one sort or another for both insects and humans.
 Introduce heritage varieties or, even better, native plants that are adapted to cater to native pollinators, rather than going for the latest creations of the plant breeders.
 Reserve an untouched corner here and there where pollinators can take refuge. This will bring a new kind of unruly beauty to the garden.

Randy
April 26, 2009 at 8:10 pm

Thanks for all the great tips. I sure lots of our readers would like to help.